


Hard Road: A Comic Series by Steven S. Harrington

by imperfectabstraction



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Art, Billy Hargrove Has a Crush on Steve Harrington, Bisexual Steve Harrington, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Battle of Starcourt (Stranger Things), Post-Season/Series 03, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington Friendship, Steve Harrington & Maxine "Max" Mayfield Have a Sibling Relationship, Steve Harrington Has a Crush on Billy Hargrove, Steve Harrington the comic book artist, The Upside Down, will byers & steve harrington friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:54:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28499385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperfectabstraction/pseuds/imperfectabstraction
Summary: Steve is just trying to heal when he starts drawing a comic about Billy Hargrove. He just wants to make amends and give a dead boy a happier ending than the one he ended up with. He didn't know it was going to bring to light questions that he didn't even know his heart was asking and he certainly didn't think it would lead him to love, family, acceptance and acclaim.But somehow everything he ever hoped for Billy in a comic was his to claim in the real world.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 10
Kudos: 103





	Hard Road: A Comic Series by Steven S. Harrington

If there is anyone who can really be thanked for the creation of Hard Road it’s Will Byers.

Steve had always liked drawing. He would doodle on his notes and even the margins of his tests back in school. Sometimes he would doodle something on receipts with a thank you to wait staff, even at bougie restaurants he was forced to attend with his parents, but Steve never would have said art was _his thing_. Not like drawing was Will’s thing or music was Robin’s thing or photography was Jonathan’s.

Drawing was just something he did when he was bored.

When he was a kid his parents used to compliment him on his drawings. His mother even signed him up for a few figure drawing classes, but they always made it very clear that they expected it to just be a hobby and that art would never be a viable career path for a Harrington boy. Then, when he got to high school, Tommy and Carol used to make fun of the art kids, called them freaks and losers, and he just got used to never showing anybody that he could draw beyond making silly little characters that they could all make fun of.

He almost forgot about it.

It was Will who rediscovered it one day. The smaller Byers had been up in Steve’s room searching for an old yearbook to make a collage for Jonathan and Nancy’s anniversary when he found a sketchbook filled with Steve’s old drawings and a few nightmare induced renderings of demodogs and the Mindflayer that Steve had drawn on stained napkins when he couldn’t sleep.

“Steve!” Will had said as he ran full force down the stairs in socked feet. “I didn’t know you could draw!”

That drew the entirety of the Party to him as he held the sketchbook and the napkins aloft in his hand, all of the then teens crowded around the discovery.

Steve had hardly batted an eyelash. “I can’t really.”

“What?! Steve, these are so good!” Dustin had defended his drawings at a screaming volume.

“Very nice,” Eleven concurred, as she flipped through a page.

“Super realistic man,” Lucas had said with a whistle as he sorted through the napkins in his hand.

Steve had shrugged and purposely ignored the strange fluttering in his stomach when the collage was abandoned and the kids spent the next hour going through the sketch book, oohing and awing at things they particularly liked, like a drawing he had done of his mother’s profile or the time he had practiced hands by drawing his dad typing or holding a pen with his father’s bemused permission. It was nice to be told he was good at something and nicer still to see the kids doing something normal after everything that they had been through over the past few years.

Eventually everyone but Will had gone home so he could finally work on the collage and the sketchbook was placed back to the side, though not without Dustin loudly demanding a picture of Steve’s great-aunt’s Ragdoll cat, Jupiter, to give to his mom. Steve was sitting cross legged from Will, struggling and probably failing to cut out a picture of Nancy from another girl in her science class without chopping Nancy’s arms off.

“I do it too, ya know,” Will had said quietly behind a bottle of glue.

“Do what?”

“When I have nightmares or when I start getting scared of the Upside Down coming back again, I draw the things that we saw. I draw them and sometimes I make it so it’s different than what happened before. I make Bob slay the Mindflayer. I draw Dart protecting Dustin from a pack of demodogs. I change it so that I have control and it…it really helps. Sometimes, I mean. Not always but…It makes me…it makes me feel stronger.”

Steve accidentally cuts Nancy in half in shock because what Will is saying is exactly what he’s doing. He’ll wake up from a nightmare and immediately puts the images he saw on whatever paper like substance is around him. Some nights he’ll stare down the teeth of a demodog for hours, putting every detail down until he can look at it without feeling afraid anymore because this time he’s creating it. This time, he’s in control.

No one had ever seen him like Will had in that moment. Not his parents, not Nancy, and not even Robin.

“Anyway,” Will says softly when the silence between them has gone on for too long. “I just wanted to say I understand and if…if you wanted to draw together sometimes, I would really like that.” The smaller Byers says as he continues gluing images of his brother to a thick page of cardstock.

“I want to,” Steve replies, Will looking up at him with surprise. “I’d, uh, I’d really like that too.”

“Okay,” Will smiles and not for the first time Steve feels like maybe he isn’t an only child after all.

That conversation had turned into weekly, then biweekly, then triweekly meetings between Will and Steve where they would draw and share their drawings together. It was both a technical meeting of the minds, where Will and Steve would give each other feedback on what they drew, and a weird form of art therapy where they would process what they were feeling as they looked over each other’s work. By the third week of meeting alone Steve had already lost track of how many times they’d cried in front of each other, but it was in the fourth month of meeting that Steve finally revealed the image that left him pacing around his house in the middle of the night, turning on every light, and looking around every corner.

“It’s Billy.” Will whispered as he stared down at the image in his hands. “But he made it out of Starcourt.”

Steve nods as he anxiously bites at his nails, eyes flicking up to Will and back down to the image of Billy Hargrove stepping out of the Camaro with a smirk on his lips and a giant, octopus shaped scar on his bare chest. It was the first time he was showing Billy to Will but had to be the hundredth time that he had drawn Billy alive and happy again and he was nervous. Will had understood Steve’s feelings in every other drawing, but Steve didn’t even understand his own feelings about Billy Hargrove. They had never been friends—shit Billy had given him a concussion and a permanent scar on his forehead—but somehow the fact that Billy was dead was something that broke his heart. Maybe because it was only after he was dead that they found out that Neil Hargrove used to use his son as a punching bag or maybe it was because Eleven had told Steve that when he was bleeding out and saying sorry on the mall floor that it had been to all of them. He didn’t know why, but Billy haunted his dreams at night, and if he could do anything differently, he would have saved Billy too.

“It just sucks that he never got a better story than the one we saw, you know? Like, he was so much more than just this macho bully. He deserved to be happy.”

“So you made him happy,” Will nods before passing the picture back. “I really like it, Steve. I think it’s some of your best work. You should draw him more often. Give him the story you think he should have had.”

After Will had left that night, Steve had stayed up for most of the night, not because of nightmares but because he kept thinking about what Billy had deserved and what Billy had deserved was to be a hero that got to see benefits of his heroism. He deserved a life where he had friends and family who loved him. He deserved a rewrite to his story.

Steve spent the next six months giving him one.

He had never drawn a comic before, but the internet gave him plenty of suggestions to read, videos to watch, and a community to ask questions to. Despite still working minimum wage at a Best Buy, he was able to quickly purchase comic design software and a high-quality tablet with some gentle guilting to his absentee parents. Will readily supplied him with actual comics to read and reference, and although she didn’t know what she was doing, Robin was helping him sort through plot points.

Billy Hargrove, abused teenage boy that was possessed and killed by a monster before his time, became a handsome con man from the wrong side of the tracks who ended up caught in a complex battle between demonic forces and the human magicians who combatted them. In his comic, Billy was possessed but overcame his possession to spare the life of an innocent child. His Billy bested the demon and lived, absorbing its powers and becoming the equivalent of an incognito superhero.

He gave Billy friends that would become his family, the way the Party had become a family to Steve. He gave himself to Billy too, though that took a while to be able to admit to himself. His Billy didn’t have to walk through evil alone. He had another version of Steve beside him, a kind of derpy manchild of an upper crust magical family who had no magic of his own beyond carrying a magical staff that he meleed demons to death with but whose experience with the magical was essential in helping navigate the world of demons and magic.

The two characters hate each other first, both of them thinking they don’t need the other and are above each other, only to see beyond each other’s appearances and become the best of friends.

At least, he thought they seemed like friends.

“So these guys you are describing are gay, right?” Robin asks on a drive to the movies, causing Steve to almost slam on his breaks in alarm.

“What?” Steve exclaims. “Wha-?” Why? Why would you think that! I just said they’re best friends!”

“Steve, you’ve just described how these two dudes have a moment where they see into each other’s souls and realize that they are meant to be together. Plus, they have that whole enemies to friends to soon to be lovers thing going on _and_ the only female character either of them ever hang out with is a sassy lesbian witch. It’s very clear they’re into each other.”

And that just wrecks Steve’s whole world.

“I mean where are you even watching this? The plot is cool but it also sounds like the gayest thing I have ever heard of and I say that _as_ a gay,” Robin snorts.

“I’m not watching it,” Steve says slowly.

“What do you mean you’re not watching it? Steve, you’ve been describing this show to me for the last month and a half,” Robin frowns. “Are you saying you’re reading it? Because, no offense dingus, but I have not seen you pick up a book since you graduated high school.”

“I’m writing it. It’s my story. I mean…I’ve been drawing and writing a comic. It’s my comic I’ve been describing. I just didn’t tell you because I wanted to know if you thought it was stupid without worrying about hurting my feelings.”

“What?!” Robin shouts before punching Steve in the shoulder. “You’re writing a comic and you didn’t even think to tell me? The actual geek in this friendship? Steve! That is so cool! I didn’t even know you could draw! How did you come up with the-”

“Billy is the main character. I’m the guy from the magical family. I made Billy and I gay in my story,” Steve says emotionlessly.

Robin winces but doesn’t say anything.

Steve’s head is reeling. “I made us gay. I made Billy gay. I made myself gay. I made Billy and I gay together.”

“Okay, Steve, why don’t we just pull over for a second?” Robin says with a gentle hand on his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel.

“Why did I make us gay, Robin? Am I gay? I’m not gay. I loved Nancy! I think boobs are great!”

“Steve…”

He pulls the car to a stop as his voice rises hysterically. “But you’re totally right, Robin! Where are the boobs in my story? There are no boobs! There’s just me and Billy! And you, actually, though the witch character is kind of like a combination of you and Max, but that’s not the point! Why did I make myself so close to Billy? Did I…Did I like Billy? Did I…Did I love Billy?” And then he’s crying, which freaks Robin out more because she’s never even seen him cry before, and his voice breaks as he keeps sobbing like an actual psychopath in the car. “I never even realized that I… I never even got to tell him, Robin!”

Robin unbuckles her seatbelt to throw her arms around him as he cries into his hands and realizes that somehow, Billy’s deserved happiness was entirely interwoven with his own.

He doesn’t know how long they sit on the side of the road, he only knows they missed the movie and that his head hurts terribly when his tears finally subside.

Robin still has her warm hands wrapped around him when she says, “Well Steve, let’s tell everyone now.”

Robin comes home with him that night and scrolls through every frame of the comic’s issues that Steve has thought through so far. When she looks up at him, there are tears in her eyes, but a look of fierce determination on her face. “Let’s get your story out there, dingus,” she vows.

That same night Robin convinces him to use a webtoon platform to post the first three issues of the comic online and creates a Gofundme page to ask for donations to bring the comic to life. She also tells Steve something that Steve has thought about repeatedly but was actively avoiding.

“You need to tell Max you’re making a comic about her brother,” Robin instructs firmly.

He does. Because he has no idea how Max would respond to seeing drawings of Billy, even if he made a few tweaks to make it less obvious who it was the comic was about, like lengthening his hair and styling it in flowing curls beneath a messing bun in a half up, half down do; sharpening his jaw and aging him into the grown man he should have had a chance to become.

“I’ll ask her to come over in the morning,” Steve promises and he always endeavors to keep a promise.

-HR-

Max is clearly surprised when Steve calls her and asks her to stop by so they can talk. He likes Max and he is pretty sure she likes him, but they never hang out alone. Back when Neil Hargrove was around it was probably because Steve and Max were both afraid of what the volatile older Hargrove would think of his teenage daughter hanging out with an adult man. But Neil is gone after drinking too many beers at a bar and attempting to drive through an Indiana winter with no snow tires. Now it just feels like habit to always have a buffer between them.

Still, Max shows up to his house without much question. That’s the benefit of fighting monsters, Steve guesses. Your friends rarely question it when you tell them you need them.

There is some trepidation in her blue eyes as she sits down on the loveseat in the den, but if Max thinks it’s weird that she is there, she doesn’t say it aloud. “You said you needed to talk to me?” She asks slowly, fiddling with the too long sleeves of Billy’s tattered jean jacket.

Neil Hargrove had attempted to throw everything that reminded him of his son away but was ultimately thwarted by Max and the rest of the Party engaging in the longest and possibly smelliest case of dumpster diving that Steve had ever had to witness. Now Max was a living artifact of Billy, wearing his clothes and jewelry, and valiantly trying to smoke even though it was clear that she hated the taste. Steve never really had the chance to know Billy too well, but he liked to think that if Billy could see her, the blonde would think she was pretty badass to take after him rather than her mild-mannered mother.

“I want to talk with you about Billy,” Steve decides to bite the bullet.

Max is much harder to read than all the other kids in the Party, except for maybe Eleven, but usually if you couldn’t read Eleven it was because she was too busy reading you to worry about her facial expressions. But somehow Steve can see a wall go up as soon as he’s done speaking, the red headed girl forcibly slumping back on the love seat in feigned nonchalance.

“What do you want to talk about? You probably saw more of him than I did the past couple of years,” Max snips.

“I don’t mean to ask you questions about Billy, Max. I want to—I need to show you something and it’s about Billy.” Steve takes a deep breath through his nose before he pulls his tablet off the cover table and opens up the title page of issue one of Hard Road. It’s nearly the same image of Billy that he showed to Will months and months prior, but the Billy in this picture is wearing aviators, a cheap suit, and stepping out of a pale-yellow Cadillac, and features the changes that he envisioned for a significantly older and more jaded Billy.

Max reaches for the tablet before pulling her hand back like it’s burned her, her eyes stuck on the words Hard Road, a Comic by Steven S. Harrington that are stamped above and below the image. “What—What is this? Is that Billy?” She sounds more shocked than she sounds angry but Steve is worried it could go toward the latter quickly if he doesn’t explain himself.

“You know how Will and I meet up a lot to talk about art and stuff?”

Max nods.

“A lot of what we do is…We talk about the Upside Down and everything that has happened to us. We started doing this thing where we would draw what happened again but this time, we would win. We tried to turn the tragedy into something good. For me, cause I feel like if you want to know what Will draws that is something he should tell you, I draw…” He clears his throat as his cheeks warm with embarrassment. “I draw Billy, Max. I draw him having a life and getting to grow up like the rest of us. And after a while that turned into this. It’s a story where Billy beats the Mindflayer and all the things that could have come after. I mean, it’s not really the Mindflayer, but…I guess it would be better for you to read it,” Steve finishes awkwardly, pushing the tablet into Max’s hands.

For a minute Max just stares at the tablet and at him, though he makes a valiant effort to pick at loose strings in the couch cushions than to look back at her, before she starts scrolling through the comic. Minutes go by. Then an hour. Then an hour and half and Max doesn’t say anything to him. She just keeps scrolling through the tablet, sometimes laughing, sometimes sniffling, and occasionally trembling with some emotion that Steve is too scared to name.

She stops after scrolling back a while, stops straight at the moment that he was describing to Robin in the car the day before, where a spell reveals that Billy’s character Finn and Steve’s character Reginald/Reg have complementary souls and that the two of them have connected with each other in multiple lifetimes. It’s a moment where both of them reflect on the loneliness they’ve experienced in their lives and are both quietly joyous at the fact that they’ve found each other, overwhelmed and comforted simultaneously by the fact that they now have one person they know they can rely on.

The dialogue between the two of them becomes much more flirtatious after that, Steve realized last night. It’s funny because several lines are things that Billy actually said to Steve once but now Reg has the opportunity to flirt back whereas Steve was too oblivious to name the intensity between them for the sexual electricity it was really was.

“The reason why we moved here was because Neil caught Billy kissing a boy on the beach once,” Max says suddenly. “Neil put Billy in the hospital because of it. We left because they took x-rays and they saw Billy had all these fractures that were never treated and the doctors called child protective services; my mom told me the truth the night before his funeral. I thought we came here because Billy was stupid and got in some fight with some gang and our parents were too scared to stay in California. I hated him so much for being the reason we moved here. I think he hated me because I was so stupid. I never even realized Neil was hitting him until I saw it happen right in front of me. I got to have all these things he couldn’t have. I got a mom and a dad who loved me. I could kiss boys on the beach all I wanted. I could paint my nails and wear jewelry and Neil and my mom would be happy because of it. I could mouth off and I wouldn’t get hit. I got everything he ever wanted and it’s just because of what? The fact that I don’t have a dick?” She laughed humorlessly.

“Billy would bring you up a lot, but I thought it was just because he wanted to bother you after that night at the Byers. He’d be like, ‘Is Harrington gonna be there?’” She imitated Billy in a whiny, nasally voice that sounded nothing like the boy and made Steve laugh. “And I’d be like, ‘Stay out of my business, asshole! Leave Steve alone!’ I thought everything was about me. I never even thought of my own brother as someone who could love somebody else. I was the worst sister.”

“No Max, you weren’t,” Steve tries to argue only for the redhead to deal him a fierce, tearful glare.

“Yes, I was. I should have noticed he was flayed. I should have noticed that his dad hit him way before the first time I saw it happened. I should have noticed that he liked boys—that he liked _you_ and I should have told him it was ok. I should have been the one person who could rely on and I just—I just wasn’t!” Max yells.

Steve pulls the tablet away from her to grab her hands, forcing them between his own as he stares her in her mottled face. “You’re just a kid, Max. That wasn’t your responsibility.”

“He was just a kid! We were all just kids! Why didn’t anyone protect him? Why didn’t anyone care? Why didn’t I care?!” She fought against his grip, but Steve just held on tighter, forcing her hands between her knees as he scooped her up into his chest and pressed her wet face against his neck, shushing her as she sobbed in his lap. “Why does he only get this now? Why couldn’t he have this all before? Why? It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”

“I know, Max. It’s not fair. But none of us realized it, okay? It’s not just you. I didn’t notice either. I know Hop and Joyce feel bad every day that there was a kid that was being hurt and they didn’t do anything about it,” He says as he pets at her bright orange hair. “But we see him now. And we accept him now and that still matters, Max. It still matters.”

Max pulls away gently this time and so Steve lets her go, his heart breaking as he watches her push wet strands of hair out of her freckled face. “You’re ok with only having this?” She gestures toward the tablet. “You’re ok with knowing that maybe it could have been more but all of us were too stupid to see it?”

The words should make his heart heavy, but it makes something bloom inside his chest instead. “This is the only way that I can have him, so yes. Even if it isn’t real, I want to do something more for Billy than I did when he was alive. I want to tell him how I feel, and I want another person to see it, see him, for the person he really was or maybe the person he might have been; I don’t know. But I want some version of Billy Hargrove to be known and loved and cared for and this is the only way I could think to do it.”

Max stares into his eyes for a long time, searching for something that Steve is worried he cannot provide, only to nod resolutely at whatever she finds gazing back at her. “Okay,” She says simply. “Then give me the stylus because some of the stuff in here is shit Billy would never do or say.”

He laughs then, bright and incredulous, because somehow the Party always seems to surprise him. These are the best and most resilient people he will probably ever know in all his life and he’s more grateful for them than he has words.

The comic then becomes he, Will, Max and Robin’s baby. The four of them meet frequently to hash out details and improve the series. Robin turns the queer subtext of the comic into, well, context, Steve guesses. Max is an expert on all things Billy/Finn, down to the clothes he wears and the liquor he drinks, and the random people he hooks up. Whereas Will helps with the artistry of it all, from the dimensions of objects to color theory.

When the rest of the party finds out about the comic, they are admittedly a little upset at being left out. By they, he really means Dustin. _Dustin_ is upset about being left out. Lucas is upset that Max has been spending more time with Steve than him, which Steve didn’t even know about, and Mike is upset Steve has been getting so much quality time with Will. While Will seems apologetic, Max tells Lucas he is a narcissist. This leaves Mike at pretty much baseline level annoying, Lucas feeling betrayed, and Dustin refuses to speak to him for a couple of days until Steve gives him exclusive power over the promotion of the comic and the GoFundMe account.

But giving Dustin power over the promotion and funding ends up being a good thing.

Hard Road, a clear derivative of Hargrove and “completely fucking lame, Steve, Jesus!” according to Mike, doesn’t become popular overnight, but it does become something that is talked about on the far geek corners of the internet. Corners turn into private messages which turn into reddit topics which apparently turn into blog posts which turn into reviews.

Steve is stunned to find that people like his comic. They like Billy and they like his story.

Queer fans enjoy the sexual chemistry between Finn and Reg. Nerds enjoy the magical element. Comic book fans enjoy the quality and storyline.

Hard Road starts off as a three issue webtoon and in three years it leads him here, to a comic book signing at a local bookstore, celebrating the completion of Part 2 of the series. While Max had never wanted her name attached to the comic, Robin and Dustin become his managers. Dustin manages payments and Robin works to secure events and Steve gets to actually draw out what he wants and what he dreams of for an actual living wage.

It’s surreal.

He tells his audience that during the Q and A before the signing, but he also tells them what they want to know. Hard Road started because he was trying to heal from the tragedy of the Starcourt Mall explosion and he and a good friend used art to cope. He never thought it was going to come of anything, but it did, and now he was here in front of seventy or so people, some of them dressed as the characters, which never failed to make him smile, to answer their questions and sign well used and immaculate issues at their request.

A dark-skinned girl raises her hand from the back and Steve calls on her readily when he sees the excitement on her face. She’s beaming when she asks, “So Mr. Harrington, when are Reg and Finn gonna kiss?”

A slew of cheers echo through the audience at that. It’s one of the more popular questions. Fans are getting a little tired of the will they or won’t they, but it’s been surprisingly hard for Steve to imagine their first kiss when the knowledge that this is one component that could have been true but wasn’t makes him sadder than it probably should after all this time.

“All I can say is, keep reading. It may be coming sooner than you think,” he winks to the sound of audible groans.

“But Finn and Reg are soulmates! They are going to be together, aren’t they?” Another female voice asks from the crowd.

“They are together, in my mind, as much of a cop out as that sounds like. Both of them have been more emotionally intimate with each other than they have been with anyone else in their whole lives. Their love goes beyond what’s happening between them physically but I can say that physical connection is important to both of them and that is something I hope to address in Part 3. Next question?” He calls out as he nods to a shorter Asian male timidly raising his hand in the middle of the crowd.

The boy seems surprised that he was called upon, but shakes off his shock enough to say, “Um, I don’t…I don’t really have a question. I just wanted to say that, um, thank you Mr. Harrington. For a lot of us who have had bad childhoods and maybe said and did things that ostracized us, it means a lot to see people give Finn a second chance. So yeah, thanks.”

“Thank you,” Steve smiles, “It means a lot to me that the comic means a lot to you,” he says sincerely and receives a blush in return.

“Reading from the list of submitted questions, someone has asked who you believe would play Finn and Regg if the comic were to be turned into a film?” Robin pipes up from beside him, hair piled in a messing bun on top of her head.

“Oh god, I’m so bad at this stuff!” Steve laughs. “Um…I don’t know! Whoever you want, I guess! Is Brad Pitt still cool?” Audible groans echo throughout the audience. “No? Ok, so not Brad Pitt then. But I do think Emma Stone would make a great Cassandra.”

The questions pour in for about another twenty minutes before Robin calls it and tells Steve to whip out his pen and glasses and start signing people’ copies. The audience settles into a very squiggly line as people come up and get their issues signed. Steve enjoys this part the most. He’s always been a social person so making conversation and getting to know the fans is a pleasure that he always looks forward to.

The line is dying by the time he has to shake his hand out to keep it from cramping. He’s lost count of how many comics he has signed and how many messages to friends and family he has written despite his atrocious handwriting. His jaw aches a little from smiling so much but it’s a pain he would happily embrace again and again.

He reaches for a bottle of water after waving the last fan out and takes several generous gulps when Robin puts a hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to start packing up the issues we didn’t sell and work out the logistics with the shop owner,” she explains before heading to the back.

Steve watches her go with a smile. It’s hard to believe that he gets to keep his best friend with him wherever he goes. He wishes Dustin, Will, and Max could have made it but they’re all dealing with finals week. He’s so proud of all of them. For all of them to have faced so much and lost so much, they’re incredibly normal, accomplished kids.

It’s that thought that has him smiling down at his cellphone in the side pocket of his backpack, the screen black, but the image of he, Robin, Nancy, Jonathan, and the party smiling outside of the arcade is there in in his mind. He wonders if there was a chance that Billy could have ever been in one of the pictures that are stored in his gallery or whether he would have refused to be in them because he was too cool. Maybe he would have stopped caring about that sort of thing if he had felt a little less alone in life, Steve ponders sadly as he takes another sip of water.

The thud of something heavy hitting the desk makes him jump, coughing as his fingers involuntarily squeeze an unwanted amount of water in his mouth and up his nose. “Sorry I’m late. Got time to sign a few more?” A fan asks as Steve wipes water off his face and tries and fails to get the water he was drinking cleared from his nose and throat.

Peering at the table with admittedly tearful eyes as he continues to choke, Steve can’t help but make the situation even worse for himself when he sees the stacks of comics that make up Part 1 and Part 2 of the series dumped across his table and starts laughing in between coughing and clearing his throat. “Just—just a few, huh?” He laughs, covering his mouth as more water comes up from the back of his throat.

The fan doesn’t respond, allowing Steve to get his shit together long enough to grab a tissue and cough several more times into it before his choking resides and he can rub the tears out of his eyes. Another laugh escapes his throat in the silence and he can’t help but shake his head. This guy reminds him of Dustin—oblivious in his entitlement. Fortunately, Steve loves Dustin and more fortunate still, he loves the people who love Hard Road as much as he does.

He bends beneath the desk to find another pen in the front pocket of his backpack and clicks it open loudly in the silence that has fallen between him and the fan that has somehow arrived twenty minutes late to a three-hour long event. “Looks like I haven’t gotten carpal tunnel yet, so I think I can help you out,” he says as a smirk crosses over his face. He pulls his glasses out of his breast pocket and slides the round tortoiseshell frames back onto his face.

Steve doesn’t even look up as he opens up the first issue of the comic to sign his name in his cringeworthy, messy handwriting. “Who should I address this to?” He asks as he pens a short message beneath the acknowledgments of the second page—“It’s never too late to get what you want” written in blocky, slanted letters that take up too much of the page.

“Billy. Billy Hargrove.” The fan above him nearly whispers.

Steve’s hand froze across the page in the midst of writing the second L in Billy, an ink mark slowly growing as he presses the pen harder against the page. He’s not sure he’s even breathing when he looks up over the rim of his glasses and sees startlingly blue eyes staring back at him.

An older Billy Hargrove stands before him, his blonde hair cut short around the sides with a curtain of curls piled up on the top of his head before cascading over his forehead, covering the scar in his brow that Steve had drawn a thousand times on the Billy in his own comic. A silver scar the size of Steve’s index finger ran along the side of his tanned cheek. Crows feet were prominent around his eyes.

But other than that, the man in front of him was entirely the same Billy Hargrove that Steve had now drawn a million times and the same Billy Hargrove whose body had fallen without sound from the tentacles of the Mindflayer to never rise again. He looked as strong as he did back then, well-muscled and a little intimidating in a black leather jacket, a deep v-neck grey shirt, fingerless gloves, and a pair of tight dark-blue jeans. The only difference was that his body was a little older and a little more worn, with a greater number of battle wounds and scars decorating his partially displayed chest and collarbone than there used to be.

Steve still hasn’t stopped pressing down with his pen. The underside of his hand has gone wet as blue ink keeps spilling forward and staining his hand and ruining the page of his own comic. He opens his mouth but no words manage to come out. The ghost he keeps with him is now corporeal in front of him, capable of touching and being touched and Steve can’t do anything for fear he’ll vanish as soon as he tries.

Billy doesn’t vanish. He stares down at Steve with his blue eyes, unblinking, even as a small smile starts to tug at the corner of his lips. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Harrington,” he says without humor.

A tear escapes from Steve’s eyes and drops onto the open page of Hard Road, ruining it even further as it sends ink splashing across the acknowledgments page.

“Your uh, your comic isn’t half bad. I…I like it, even though I’m not typically into nerd stuff,” Billy says, suddenly sheepish in front of him and rubbing the back of his neck with his hand, cheeks flushed in the bright lights of the bookstore. “Am I the…” Billy clears his throat and looks everywhere _but_ at Steve. “The main guy…he looks like me. He based on me?”

Maybe it’s the simplicity of the question that allows him to swallow the lump that has manifested in his throat, but Steve finds himself nodding as he lets out a shaky, “Yes.”

Billy laughs at his answer, but it lacks the confidence that laughing in Steve’s face once had. It sounds shaky, uncertain, and maybe even scared if Steve is being honest with himself. “You think about me a lot, pretty boy?” Billy asks, voice cracking just a little bit at the end, and suddenly it’s blue and brown clashing as their eyes meet; electricity rising between them; hope and fear mixing together as the vulnerability in Billy’s gaze connects with Steve’s.

No answer has ever come easier.

“Every day,” Steve whispers. “I think about you every day.”

Some barrier between them is destroyed at Steve’s words and Billy’s face opens up; blue eyes going wide with wonder as the lines briefly disappear from his face. “And the partner guy…he you?” Billy asks breathlessly.

“Yes,” Steve says again and maybe it’s the magic that is having something that you have dreamed of for nights on end right in front of you but Steve feels as brave as he did facing down monsters and sucker punching Russian agents when he says, “It was the only way that I could be with you.”

And Billy transforms before his very eyes then; all signs of age fading away as his cherry red lips part to reveal a blindingly warm smile that makes him look like he’s eighteen years old again, watching the kids at the pool with Heather Holloway laughing by his side. The blonde man reaches forward and cups Steve’s jaw in his hands, thumbs gently caressing the apples of his cheeks and wiping tears away.

Steve finally manages to let his pen go to allow his ink-stained hand to hold Billy’s wrist closer to him. The sleeve of Billy’s jacket rides up and Steve’s heart breaks as he catches the _013_ that has been tattooed there before he slides away from Billy’s touch to press the softest of kisses against the numbers.

Billy lets out a small gasp at the sensation but doesn’t flinch away the way Steve would have expected him to. Instead, the younger man seems to want to pull closer to him, his nose gently rubbing against Steve’s as his warm breath ghosts over his mouth. His breath smells sweet like cherry candy. “You never answered that girl’s question,” he swallows audibly. “When are Finn and Reg gonna kiss?”

Steve’s heart is racing as he leans up closer to Billy’s smiling mouth. “They’ll kiss as soon as Finn says he wants them to.”

“I want you to,” Billy whispers.

Steve does, again, and again, for as long as Billy will let him.


End file.
